Month: January 2010

On 15th Jan, I attended an Insider Breakfast event held at Bridgewater Hall hosted by Michael Taylor and his team. Read Insider – Morning with who’s who of Manchester Corporate Sector for my coverage of the event. Following on from there, I am running an event on the Next Generation Broadband Access jointly with DC-KTN. Event details are below and I hope you will be able to join us on the 22nd Feb at eOffice Manchester. Please visit DC-KTN to register for this free event. This event gives you the opportunity to have your say on what the future of…

For the last five weeks, Northern StartUp 2.0 website has been under attack by spammers. The spamming was related to opening accounts, about 5 every hour, which has resulted in over 1000 new accounts. Less than 1% of these accounts have actually added any comments, but if they all did, the site will be overwhelmed by spammed comments. Here are some facts about the site: Drupal 5.3 Accounts are needed to comment Based on various suggestions via Twitter and from Ixis IT (previous website development team) and CTISN (current website development team), following changes were made: Captcha Recaptcha Mollow Akismet…

I (NS20) hosted a round table discussion yesterday at Horwath Clark Whitehill’s offices in Manchester. This was an by invitation only session with no none tech CEOs. Prior to the kick off, Ed French of EV Group (venture capitalist) dropped in to have coffee, and later on, Steve Livingston from HorwathCW dropped into join the conversation. The participants were: Duncan Stockdill – Javelin CRM Katrina Delargy – Tiyga Craig Taylor – Thingymail Richard Francis – Makeurmove.com Manoj Ranaweera – edocr.com John Brickley – Whamoosh.com Whilst the contents of what was discussed remains confidential, there are few issues worth bringing out…

As Michael Taylor, Editor of the North West Insider introduced me at the yesterday’s Insider Breakfast event, “where’s Manoj, a short chap, ah there he is”. Luckily, Sean Fensom, Chairman and Digital Veteren of Manchester Digital later came to my rescue as he is shorter than me. At this point, I felt a whole lot better, having cocked up my earlier question to the panel, which Dave Carter, Head of Manchester Digital Development Agency responded by saying that if we want help, talk to the VCs. Unfortunately, there are only two VCs in town (EV Group and YFM Private Equity). They…

Just an idea at this stage, but have approached a group of early stage companies in the USA to sound it out. The objectives: Promote companies and products – an exhibition Build partnerships with startups from Manchester (edocr.com, JavelinCRM, others), London and rest of the UK API Explosion – Get the tech community involved Tour of local tech hubs for those thinking of setting base in the NW Get the public sector involve, so that we can explore incentives for setting up Perhaps a three day event: Day 0 – Check-in to hotels Day 1: Registration, local tours, Dinner Day…

Sales leads – new revenues for you! It probably does not come as a surprise to those who are misfortunate enough to follow my tweets, that we, at edocr.com have embarked on a major programme to deliver real measurable value to an existing asset you have, but probably was never trully aware of its full potential until now. Yes! we are speaking about the documents (pdfs) you produce daily, weekly, monthly and/or annually to communicate with prospects, customers, suppliers, shareholders, government, authorities, and anyone else that you need to communicate with, without dilvulging confidential information. Among these documents are the…

As edocr.com continues to grow, it has become essential for us to adopt the right tools that will make our lives operationally little bit easier. Now is the time for us to leave spreadsheets and move on to products that will bring structure to a very chaotic environment. Two tools will be key to this strategy of operational simplification. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) We have adopted Contact Manager from Salesforce.com, which is affordable and versatile enough for our needs. And we know that as edocr.com grows, we have a path for increasing the CRM functionality to match with our future…